From Amazon.ca
John Kenneth Galbraith has led an extraordinary life. The world's most famous living economist started teaching at Harvard when he was just 25 years old and has sold seven million copies of his four dozen books. One reviewer said Galbraith wrote "history that reads like a poem." During World War II, at age 32, he was named "tsar" of consumer-price controls in the United States, and he later advised three American presidents and served as ambassador to India. Now in his 90s, Galbraith is still active and has received 50 honorary degrees. All this was accomplished by a Canadian born in a tiny Ontario farming hamlet, whose major at an obscure agricultural college wasn't even economics but animal husbandry. Such an irony is typical of Galbraith's renowned iconoclasm, writes Richard Parker in his 820-page biography John Kenneth Galbraith.

Parker shows how Galbraith's irreverent views were shaped by the Depression, which helped turn him into a passionate advocate of Keynesian economics, the philosophy that inspired FDR's New Deal. Galbraith later became one of the architects of the expansion of federal social services after World War II. Because of his influence in successive administrations, readers get a fascinating fly-on-the-wall picture of debates and intrigue inside the White House during many of the major crises of the Cold War. Galbraith frequently played crucial behind-the-scenes roles that went beyond the duties of an economist: advising President Kennedy during the Cuba missile crisis, helping Lyndon Johnson write his first speech after Kennedy was assassinated, and opposing the Vietnam War, which became his most passionate cause. He later criticized the dismantling of government programs under Ronald Reagan and seemed to love clashing with conservative economists. Parker managed to sift through a mountain of material from Galbraith's long and lively years to distill an engaging narrative that, like Galbraith's own books, is easily accessible to non-economists. --Alex Roslin


From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps only an elephant of a book could cover the life and thinking of so influential a figure as John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908). But this one goes too far. While Parker, an economist, writes with fluency and expert knowledge, he thinks it essential to write short histories of everything Galbraith was involved in. And that was much, starting with New Deal Washington, then the post-WWII Strategic Bombing Survey, Harvard, JFK's administration and an ambassadorship to India—and, always, liberal Democratic politics. Through it all, Galbraith poured out torrents of never dull writings, of which The Affluent Society best embodies his combination of fresh thought, political acuity and polemical skill. He took on academic and political orthodoxies to transform the way informed people think about the economy, institutions and social justice. Despite its length, Parker's biography is a model of clarity on these matters. The author, who is altogether sympathetic to his subject, never shrinks from offering others' tough, and his own measured, judgments. Galbraith emerges as highly appealing, a man of sparkling wit liked by most of his intellectual opponents and deprecated chiefly by his hard-boiled fellow economists. While they'll long debate his contributions to economics, there's no denying, as this book makes indelibly clear, that Galbraith, has been one of the major American lives of the 20th century. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Parker is an economist, like his subject, and his biography of one of American liberalism's articulators imbibes most deeply from Galbraith's career. One of the two greatest influences on Galbraith's ideological outlook, Parker declares, was John Maynard Keynes' macroeconomic landmark The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), and the other was Galbraith's father, an agrarian populist in early 1900s Ontario. Galbraith has witnessed nearly a century of change, a span Parker traces in its public and personal dimensions. He departed Canada in 1931, and until his permanent arrival at Harvard in 1948, moved among jobs in academia, the U.S. government, and Fortune magazine. Quoting Galbraith's belief that the latter job turned him into a writer, Parker extensively paraphrases and excerpts from Galbraith's stable of best-sellers, which includes such classics as The Affluent Society (1958). Also covering Galbraith's involvement in Democratic Party politics, Parker's portrait of the urbane, ironic Galbraith and his fortunes as a liberal diagnostician of American economic problems is a stout biography that will be the standard for years. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
"[An] accessible, well-written approach...An exemplary intellectual biography."


Review
"Richard Parker’s timely biography of Ken Galbraith and his brilliant career is an extraordinary gift to a nation grappling more than ever with the profound issues that Galbraith addressed so eloquently over so many years with his famed intellect and wit. Galbraith’s passion for social justice, his skepticism about excessive power in the hands of either government or the private sector, and his indispensable contributions to progressive politics and economic thought shine through every page of this book, and they are still highly relevant to our twenty-first century national debate on the great domestic and global challenges of our time.

For all who care about a better world and a fairer reconciliation at home and abroad between what Galbraith called 'private affluence and public squalor,' this remarkable volume should be required reading. It is both an education and an inspiration." --Senator Edward M. Kennedy

"This is a superb book, literate and fascinating, about one of the truly original minds of the century. No one can write about contemporary economics, politics, diplomacy, wit, satire and phrase-making without taking John Kenneth Galbraith into just account, and Richard Parker is the ideal biographer." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr

"John Kenneth Galbraith towered--literally and figuratively--over twentieth-century America, afflicting the comfortable with searing wit and unassailable logic, and comforting the afflicted with compelling ideas for improving society to the benefit of all. To understand the ideals that propelled America from FDR's New Deal until Bush's Raw Deal, one must comprehend Galbraith's life, politics, and economics. Herewith, a stunningly lucid guide. Richard Parker gives to Galbraith the deep insight and sweeping perspective that Galbraith gives to America." --Robert B. Reich, University Professor, Brandeis University

"In its breadth of interest, its erudition, its ease in explaining economics in everyday language and, above all, in its skillful, first-rate story-telling, Richard Parker's splendid, immensely readable biography is in every way a match for the towering and fascinating figure who strides through its pages." --Adam Hochschild

"John Kenneth Galbraith has been, against the tide, a shameless advocate for a government that would guarantee all of us a decent existence. This saga of his life and thought presents a lively review of what has happened to our economy and to the profession of economics in the last seventy years." --Barbara Bergmann, author of The Economic Emergence of Women

"John Kenneth Galbraith is the Harvard economist who became one of the most influential oracles of the contemporary world. An often searing critic of big business, he has been responsible for reshaping the anatomy of modern thought, extending his lively sanctions into the many branches of his eclectic intellect. In this thoughtful and highly readable volume, the Oxford-trained economist Richard Parker provides an essential guide to the man and his ideas. It captures an extraordinary life, extraordinarily well." --Peter C. Newman

"Richard Parker has written an engrossing, thoroughly researched, and authoritative account of the life of John Kenneth Galbraith. The book not only details the richly varied experiences of one of the great public intellectuals and social commentators of our time; it also offers a most interesting account of the evolution of economic thought from the era of John Maynard Keynes to the present day." --Derek Bok

"An engaging and comprehensive review of the life and times of a brilliant, prolific twentieth-century thinker. Galbraith understands that the structural determinants, limitations, and consequences of markets have been largely ignored by economists--to the detriment of the discipline and of society. This is a poignant book with important messages for the twenty-first century." --David K. Foot, University of Toronto and co-author of Boom, Bust & Echo

"Against accumulating fears, Parker lifts up a single life as an image of how intelligence, compassion, and commitment remain the essence of social hope. Somehow, we humans regularly undercut ourselves by imagining that such virtues are rare. In contrast, Parker not only finds them amply supplied in John Kenneth Galbraith, but reminds us of Galbraith's creed - that the intelligence, compassion, and commitment of every person are what define democracy, and what keep justice at the center its work." --James Carroll, The Boston Globe



The New York Times, February 16, 2005
"[An] engaging and exhaustive biography...it shows how good Mr. Galbraith was at both assessing problems and dealing with them."


Chicago Tribune, February 20, 2005
"Parker possesses the rare ability to make conflicting economic theories and professional battles among economists comprehensible to laypeople."


The Globe and Mail, February 19, 2005
"Richard Parker has produced a rich, well-written and fittingly large monument to this super-sized intellectual of the 20th century."


The New York Times Book Review, February 27, 2005
"A fine one-volume history of economic thought in the 20th century." --Thomas Frank


USA Today, February 28, 2005
"[This] is a biography that will make readers more economically and politically aware."


Book Description
The life and times of America’s most celebrated economist, assessing his lessons—and warnings—for us today

John Kenneth Galbraith’s books—among them The Affluent Society and American Capitalism—are famous for good reason. Written by a scholar renowned for energetic political engagement and irrepressible wit, they are models of provocative good sense that warn prophetically of the dangers of deregulated markets, war in Asia, corporate greed, and stock-market bubbles. Galbraith’s work has also deeply—and controversially—influenced his own profession, and in Richard Parker’s hands his biography becomes a vital reinterpretation of American economics and public policy.

Born and raised on a small Canadian farm, Galbraith began teaching at Harvard during the Depression. He was FDR’s “price czar” during the war and then a senior editor of Fortune before returning to Harvard and to fame as a bestselling writer. Parker shows how, from his early championing of Keynes to his acerbic analysis of America’s “private wealth and public squalor,” Galbraith regularly challenged prevailing theories and policies. And his account of Galbraith’s remarkable friendship with John F. Kennedy, whom he served as a close advisor while ambassador to India, is especially relevant for its analysis of the intense, dynamic debates that economists and politicians can have over how America should manage its wealth and power. This masterful chronicle gives color, depth, and meaning to the record of an extraordinary life.



About the Author
Richard Parker, an Oxford-trained economist and senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, writes extensively on economics and public policy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"John Kenneth Galbraith is America's most famous economist for good reason. A witty commentator on America's political follies and a versatile author of bestselling books that warn prophetically of the dangers of deregulated markets, corporate greed, and inattention to the costs of our military power, Galbraith always makes economics relevant to the crises of the day. This first authorized biography is, in Richard Parker's hands, an important reinterpretation both of public policy and of how economics is practiced." "Born in 1908 and raised on a small Canadian farm, Galbraith began to teach at Harvard in his twenties. In 1938 he left to work in New Deal Washington, eventually rising to become FDR's "price czar" during the war. Following his years as a writer at Fortune, where he did much to introduce the work of John Maynard Keynes to a wide audience, he returned to Harvard in 1949 and began writing the books that would make him famous." Over the years, Galbraith developed a distinctive way of "doing economics," and it made him a critic both of conservatives and of many liberal economists. From his acerbic analysis of the nation's "private wealth and public squalor" in the 1950s to his denunciations of the Vietnam War, Galbraith regularly challenged the "conventional wisdom" (a phrase he coined).

FROM THE CRITICS

Floyd Norris - The New York Times

There was a time when John Kenneth Galbraith was the most famous economist in America, a man whose books regularly became best sellers. But today he is little honored in the economics profession, where, as Richard Parker remarks in his engaging and exhaustive biography, Mr. Galbraith is regarded as something of an outsider, a fine writer who never became comfortable with the detailed mathematical formulas that came to dominate economics.

Geoffrey Kabaservice - The Washington Post

Readers whose patience will be tried by Parker's densely written 820-page tome will nonetheless appreciate the clarity and insight he brings to this portrait of the outsider as insider. For Galbraith's main contribution to politics as well as economics was to be a gadfly in tweed, skeptical of all authority and any system of fixed thought. Anyone too heavily invested in preserving the "conventional wisdom" -- a term he coined in his most famous work, The Affluent Society (1958) -- would feel the sting of his debunking, made more painful by the wit and elegance with which it was delivered. What's surprising in Parker's account is not that Galbraith had so many enemies across the ideological spectrum but that he was tolerated in high places for so long.

Stephen Clarkson - The Globe and Mail

[An] admirable biography... Those who do not want to engage with Richard Parker's detailed exposition of the finer points separating Galbraith from his fellow economists may find it too long.... Richard Parker has produced a rich, well-written and fittingly large monument to this super-sized intellectual of the 20th century.

Publishers Weekly

Perhaps only an elephant of a book could cover the life and thinking of so influential a figure as John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908). But this one goes too far. While Parker, an economist, writes with fluency and expert knowledge, he thinks it essential to write short histories of everything Galbraith was involved in. And that was much, starting with New Deal Washington, then the post-WWII Strategic Bombing Survey, Harvard, JFK's administration and an ambassadorship to India-and, always, liberal Democratic politics. Through it all, Galbraith poured out torrents of never dull writings, of which The Affluent Society best embodies his combination of fresh thought, political acuity and polemical skill. He took on academic and political orthodoxies to transform the way informed people think about the economy, institutions and social justice. Despite its length, Parker's biography is a model of clarity on these matters. The author, who is altogether sympathetic to his subject, never shrinks from offering others' tough, and his own measured, judgments. Galbraith emerges as highly appealing, a man of sparkling wit liked by most of his intellectual opponents and deprecated chiefly by his hard-boiled fellow economists. While they'll long debate his contributions to economics, there's no denying, as this book makes indelibly clear, that Galbraith, has been one of the major American lives of the 20th century. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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